Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Greg Bergquist and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF _POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._ AUGUST, 1880. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Transcriber's note: Variant spellings and unusual punctuation have been retained. AMERICAN AERONAUTS. [Illustration: BALLOON ENTANGLED IN A TREE.] Scattered here and there in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and ride off Somewhere seeking Something--just as occasional trilobites, lonely and misshapen, are found in ages subsequent to the Silurian. Of such stuff are our Arctic and African explorers made; the men who run the lightning-expresses have a touch of it; it crops out in steeple-climbers, cave-explorers, beast-tamers; it makes men assault cloud-piercing and ice-mantled mountain-peaks and launch their frail canoes for voyages down earth-riving canons and across continent sundering oceans. Sometimes action is denied, and then it strikes in and makes poets--perhaps the most daring adventurers of all. It must be difficult for the beaters of iron and the barterers in swine to understand why such useless timber is allowed to cumber the great workhouse; but then we don't know _exactly_ what the trilobites were good for, and the utilitarians may find comfort in the reflection that at the present rate the obnoxious family is likely to entirely disappear with the Palaeozoic. Aeronauts have been free and accepted members of this order of modern knights-errant, from hot-headed, ill-fated Pilatre de Rozier down to Gaston Tissandier, the man who still edits _La Nature_ in the lower strata of an ocean into the treacherous upper depths of which he has risen seven miles. Your true aeronaut is not an inventor of flying-machines, not much concerned about what is known as the "problem of aerial navigation." He is content to take the wings of the morning and be carried away to the uttermost parts of the earth. Problems he leaves to the scientists: he wooes the wilderness he cannot subdue. He is an explorer of unknown regions, a beauty-worshipper at a shrine whose pearly, sun-kissed portals open to him alone. People travel thousands of miles horizontally to rest their eyes on scenes infinitely less novel, beautiful and grand than one perpendicular mile of vantage would open to them, little matter whence taken.